On the philosophy of the novel
on the philosophy of the novel IF I have succeeded in making a just account of the place which properly belongs to philosophy in fiction, I have brought out at the same time the most cogent of the reasons why the shape of fiction as an art has undergone certain marked changes during the past half century. Up to 1859 roughly—the year of the first novel of George Eliot, and a date which has in the history of fiction something of the jnomentousness which we ascribe to it in that of science—the philosophy in fiction is felt either as an intruder or as a guest whose presence is hardly suspected at all; though, as I tried to show, that unsuspected presence is more advantage, than disadvantage. Probably all of us do, whether we know it or not, have a philosophy, even if only a philosophy of negations; and, having it, we perforce look at the world through it. This unawareness is the attitude of the drama and of the novel before George Eliot—except, of course, in homiletic, allegorical, or symbolistic pieces such as The Life and Death of Mr. Badman or Bosselas. But from the time of George Eliot the philosophy in fiction is intensely aware of itself, determined to make the most of itself as an opportunity, not merely put up with itself as a necessity. And from the moment of this conscious acceptance and welcome of philosophy, an entirely new set of considerations begins to govern the shape of fiction. The novel, whenever it deserved its hold on us, has always combined truth with pleasure; but when the emphasis shifted from pleasure to truth, there appeared a new determining principle of inclusion and exclusion, a new standard of criticism for the devices and expedients which fiction had evolved during its vassalage to pleasure. I can best state the change as an enormous decrease of the accidental and arbitrary, and a corresponding increase of the causal. The shortest name for the transition is George Eliot, who was doing perhaps her best work during the life of Thackeray, and nearly all of her work during the life of Dickens, but who is animated by a more modern spirit than either. George Eliot represents the universe naturally conceived as an organism; man as a subordinated unit of its evolution and not, philosophically, the pivot of the whole; the intricate dovetailing of cause and effect everywhere ; the facts of good and evil as products of remote and invisible causes in heredity and environment; the ungovernable sway of chance in human lives, reducing them, whether it destroy or fulfill, to mere pawns in an inscrutable game ;—in fine, the character which is fate and the fate which is above character. To express with any fullness this duality of the world and the individual, she must abandon the worn machinery of coincidence and mystery, the various wires and levers by which the novelist himself remains palpably in control of his spectacle; she must substitute for these the machinery of human will and natural forces. To begin with, she must have a narrow scene, where nature itself reduces life to a manageable simplicity; and hence she follows the provincial ideal by which Jane Austen so unconsciously profited—how wondrously we know when we stop to think that we are now only just learning how high, even if how small, is the place rightfully hers. Then, she must study not merely the actions of men and women : she must study the directions of their lives, the corrosion of character by its worst or weakest, all the implications of her accustomed theme, "the idealist in search of a vocation"; and hence she must reduce the number of events until none remain except those which have profound importance as illustrating the direction of the lives concerned—the episodes are reduced in number, and mean individually more. Finally, she must investigate not only the physical realities of actions and the emotions that underlie them, but the moral principles that underlie emotion and choice; she must go more deeply than the novel has been wont to go into the moral and intellectual life of her protagonists, in order to bring forth by reflection and analysis those realities which can be expressed but imperfectly, or not at all, in action; whence Savonarola in his cell, Bulstrode on his knees. This patient and fruitful search for the causality in life is the distinguishing contribution of George Eliot to the novel. In her we see, then, at least three significant changes in the shape of the novel, changes which it has mostly retained and intensified since the conclusion of her work : first, the narrow scene, appointed for rigorous specialization in a few person; secondly, the elimination of deliberate artifice in the manufacture of plots, and the attempt instead to bring the action out of the person e and the clash of their wills and personalities; thirdly, enlargement of the scope and importance of analysis of motives and feelings. That such are indeed the chief traits of George Eliot as a novelist is shown by our instinctive objection to her few lapses into the factitious and the accidental. Sir Leslie Stephen says of a certain episode in Romola : "Poor Romola, in her despair, gets into a miscellaneous boat lying ashore; and the boat drifts away in a manner rarely practiced by boats in real life, and spontaneously lands her in a place where everybody is dying of the plague, and she can therefore make herself useful to her fellow-creatures. She clearly ought to have been drowned, like Maggie, and we feel that Providence is made to interfere rather awkwardly. "1 We all share the feeling; but it is a feeling which we should never experience with the same force in connection with Dickens or Thackeray—writers from whom we expect a full measure of everything that can by any possibility be put into the work of fiction. That we should have the feeling in connection with such palpable contrivances in George Eliot as this extraordinary, boat of Romola's, shows in itself how essentially the novel had altered its shape by 1864—how unmistakably the philosophical point of view had even then brought about the modern change from the casual to the causal. II This general change that has come over the form of the novel is, then, the substitution of a higher unity for a lower. The effect of naturalistic philosophy in the novel is to re-open the whole question of the devices and subterfuges of the novel in their relation to the integrity of the whole ; to re-open it as a sub-. ordinate phase of our other inclusive question„ the relation of art to life. Only with the ascendancy of naturalism did the novel attain any philosophy of art to speak of; and it is only with the attainment of a philosophy of art that the novel makes its transition from artifice to truth—stops asking "What will be effective, how can the attention be won and stimulated?" and begins to ask "How best can truth be served, the nature of things unraveled?" I do not mean of course that the matter of pure strategy in the novel can be ignored, for if the story does not capture our interest it can certainly do nothing to us at all: but the emphasis becomes transferred from one of these questions to the other, and the question of technique in the novel is being elevated along with the purpose and meaning of the novel as a whole. In one way it may even be said that questions of technique become all the while more important and more exacting; for the modern notion of truth-telling cuts off all those resources of palpable contrivance in technique upon which so much of the plot-interest depends in Fielding and Dickens. And the result is that the modern practitioner must have, in one particular at least, a fuller equipment than these; for he must know how to win and hold the interest without such aids through the historical, the conventional, and simply by the amount and value of the truth he finds to tell. This elevation of the whole problem of expedients and devices in the novel means, as I have said, the substitution of a higher unity for a lower. Unity of purpose takes the place once held by the unity of trickery and elaborate organization. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that naturalism makes the same difference in the novel as in our conception of the world: it replaces arbitrary creation by the organic evolution of a thing which grows into certain forms by its own inward nature, as it were by a kind of self- compulsion. It would be interesting but futile to speculate how far and with what consistency these changes could have been followed out in the novel without Continental influences. The history of these changes since George Eliot is, as a fact, largely an affair of comparative literature; for it is evident that the novel in France and, presently, the novel in Russia did incalculably much to furnish both the ideal and the means. So far as I can express the difference between these two influences, it lies in the more fundamental simplicity and naiveté of the Russian masters, the more sophisticated and more technical proficiency of the French. It is as though the French had achieved unity as a purely artistic triumph, because of a compulsion to exhaust the possibilities of order, symmetry, and austere perfection as things desirable and matchless in themselves; whereas the Russians achieved it through a compelling need of reducing everything to an elemental simplicity, for the sake of getting outside it, mastering it: one feels the Russian temperament as less various and more strong, more tenacious and less nimble. While Flaubert and Maupassant were achieving unity by whittling down their subject to essentials, ruling out all that failed to contribute to its predetermined harmony, Turgenev and Dostoevski were achieving unity by relating their larger masses of data to some central and magnetic principle of truth. The French temper is to pick and choose, and then weave carefully the chosen elements together into a pattern; the Russian temper is to take everything there is to take, and put it into a single basket large and strong enough to carry it all. And SO) while the '70's and '80's saw British novelists learning something of their technique in France, it also saw them learning perhaps even more of the rationale of technique in Russia. Mr. Howells and Henry James. greatly as they were soon to differ in their use of what they learned, did beyond question learn much, and derive a permanent impetus in certain modern directions, first from Balzac, and then from Turgenev—to name only the most representative of influences, The distinction between French and Russian art is perhaps not so absolute as I have made it sound: what distinction ever is so absolute as one's account of it? But there is, I think, a measurable truth in my general point, that the Russian character has the greater capacity for obsession, the greater need to see all reality for the time being through a single pair of spectacles, the greater capacity to be interested in everything. And what I wish mainly to point out is this: that by the middle '90's, when one of these Continental influences was at its culmination and the other was at least beginning to exert its leverage, then, in the decade when the names now most accredited were just beginning to appear on title-pages, the modern novel in English had pretty well determined its present bent toward the Russian largeness, the Russian inclusiveness. Our younger novelists had learned from France certain of the fine fitnesses of treatment, of order; they had learned from Russia, through France, to practice these upon larger and more specialized pieces of subject matter than the French masters since Victor Hugo have commonly treated. That, on the whole, this choice of emphasis between two influences has resulted to the advantage of the novel, I may perhaps suggest by bare statement of two considerations: first, that the Russian inclusiveness of matter and of event is most like the Victorian inclusiveness which is our chief tradition in the novel, so that full adoption of the French method and ideal might have meant, relatively, the impoverishment of the novel ; secondly, that the largest possible interpretation of what is relevant to the subject of a novel best serves our modern notion of life's complexity, and gives the novelist his best chalice of seeing life steadily and whole. In 1895 British fiction had its choice of whether if should see highly specialized specimens of life and make of each a. perfect picture, or consider highly representative and typical specimens of life and see them with a single eye. The problem was unity by selection versus unity by interpretation. Our novelists mainly chose to interpret large segments of the typical ; and on the whole the developments in the form of the novel during the twenty years since that choice crystallized have shown that they did well. III Suppose we consider separately, for a moment, these two lessons which the English novel was trying to learn in the last quarter-century of Victoria's reign— the French lesson of unity through internal fitness or congruity, the Russian lesson of unity through the insistence upon a centralizing and directing purpose. Of the details of that first lesson learned in Paris, we can name and illustrate three of some technical importance. The first is oneness of tone or pitch—the necessity of keying all the parts of a given subject within an emotional gamut which does no violence to the reader's sensibilities. If we desire an interesting example of work performed under the most conscientious and single-minded zeal for such oneness, we have it in Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's completion of Stevenson's unfinished St. Ives—a task executed with such loving circumspection that one cannot tell, by internal evidence, where the break occurs. That Stevenson would have appreciated this beautiful competence shown in imitation of his style is proved by his sensitiveness to Everyone of his own failures adequately to imitate himself. Speaking of an earlier and slighter work, Prince Otto, he says in a letter to C. W. Stoddard: "How does your class get along? If you like to touch on Otto, any day in a by-hour, you may tell them—as the author's last dying confession—that it is a strange example of the difficulty of being ideal in an age of realism; that the unpleasant giddy- mindedness, which spoils the book and often gives it a wanton air of unreality and juggling with air- bells, comes from unsteadiness of key ; from the too great realism of some chapters and passages--some of which I have now spotted, others I dare say I shall never spot—which disprepares the imagination for the cast of the remainder. "Any story can be made true in its Own key; any story can be made false by the choice of a wrong key of detail or style: Otto is made to reel like a drunken —I was going to say man, but let us substitute cipher—by the variations of the key. "1 In this informal comment Stevenson, a Scott with a French artistic conscience, proves how unquestioningly he assumed that the modern sense for unity of texture is necessary, not only to realism, but also to work done in a romantic tradition. There is a kind of story which, if it is to exist at all, demands that the hero shall be invulnerable ; there is a kind of modern costume romance in which it is strictly proper that the last chapter shall show the hero converted to the religion of the majority. Perhaps one does better not to write that kind of romance ; but if one does write it one must keep it in tune with itself, even at the coat of admitting conventions which are in themselves silly. In their own irresponsible realm, the coincidences and mystifications of Wilkie Collins are not only justifiable but inevitable ; The Woman in White and The Moonstone may not be fiction of a high order, but they are at least consistent with themselves, and works of art in so far as they are of their own kind. In short, there is no art without form ; and, for modern purposes, form is fusion. This general truth becomes still more manifest as I approach a second and more specific agent of unity, the single point of view. It is not enough that the material reported upon be consonant with itself: it must harmonize with the person who reports it, whether that person be the author himself reporting omnisciently, —a method which obviously suffers from lack of verisimilitude, since no one can reasonably be expected to know all the facts or be everywhere at once, —or an observer created by the author expressly to observe, or a character in the story. The omniscient method tends to disappear, as we should expect it to in a period when the novelist finds his reward in the meanings of facts rather than in knowledge of the facts themselves. We no longer see the novelist "stand about in his scene, talking it over with his hands in his pockets, interrupting the action, and spoiling the illusion in which alone the truth of art resides, "' as Mr. Howells says of Thackeray's and Trollope's habit of personally conducting the story. The novelist who can be in all places at once and follow simultaneous actions going on apart from each other is too palpably the inventor of his facts; and, as a result of this feeling about him, we see the subplot practically disappear from modern fiction, and the action reduce itself to so much as can be comprehended from a single human point of view working under the ordinary human limitations. We are interested, not in the mechanism of complex actions, but in the moral causes and effects of actions as shown in a life or a few lives followed continuously. The culmination of this interest thus far appears in the later novels and tales of Henry James, all of which are interpreted for us through the observing consciousness of some person, not the author, who is present in the story. To these we may add the more recent practice of the direct colloquial method in some of the best work of Mr. Joseph Conrad. Thirdly, the modern craftsman has learned that there must be fusion among the various agents of the narrative process—the talk and action, the portrait- painting and characterization, which go to make up the actual written story. We have learned that the one of these elements which predominated in the earlier Victorians and in Scott, and which has latterly threatened to reduce our magazine fiction to a bare skeleton of dialogue—we have learned that the element of talk is the thinnest, most meager of all in real and lasting communicativeness. Even when talk is sifted down to the printable economy and compactness, we require a bushel of it to convey what the novelist's own interpretation of his facts can give us in a tenth of the room ; and the narrator whose dialogue is his principal stock-in-trade is not only copying the merits of the drama in conditions where they become positive defects, but he is also crowding out "the golden blocks themselves of the structure"— his own weighed, condensed, and reflective analysis. This complaint is one that Henry James, whose sense for such things was of the most subtly critical, had often to urge as his principal criticism of Mr. Howells's technique ; and in one of his London Notes 1 he urged it with even more force against the decidedly inferior dialogue of Gissing. This third point is interestingly argued by Scott in his Preface to The Bride of Lammermoor, in an imaginary conversation between Pattieson the novelist and Dick Tinto the painter. Scott inclined on the whole to Pattieson's view of talk as against description ; but the modern artist, who has more reasons than Scott had for wishing to weave a firm pattern, and no reasons for wishing to weave one of loose ends, agrees almost completely with Tinto. — " 'Your characters, ' he said, 'my dear Pattieson, make too much use of the gob box; they patter too much'—an elegant phraseology, which Dick had learned while painting the scenes of an itinerant company of players—' there is nothing in whole pages but mere chat and dialogue. ' "'The ancient philosopher, ' said I in reply, 'was wont to say, "Speak, that I may know thee"; and how is it possible for an author to introduce his personae dramatis to his readers in a more interesting and effectual manner, than by the dialogue in which each is represented as supporting his own appropriate character '1' "'It is a false conclusion, ' said Tinto ; 'I hate it, Peter, as I hate an unfilled cam. I will grant you, indeed, that speech is a faculty of some value in the intercourse of human affairs, and I will not even insist on the doctrine of that Pythagorean toper, who was of opinion that, over a bottle, speaking spoiled conversation. But I will not allow that a professor of the fine arts has occasion to embody the idea of his scene in language, in order to impress upon the reader its reality and its effect. On the contrary, I will be judged by most of your readers, Peter, should these tales ever become public, whether you have not given us a page of talk for every single idea which two words might have communicated, while the posture, and manner, and incident, accurately drawn, and brought out by appropriate coloring, would have preserved all that was worthy of preservation, and saved these everlasting said he's and said she's, with which it has been your pleasure to encumber your pages. ' "I replied, 'That he confounded the operations of the pencil and the pen ; that the serene and silent art, as painting has been called by one of our first living poets, necessarily appealed to the eye, because it had not the organs for addressing the ear ; whereas poetry, or that species of composition which approached to it, lay under the necessity of doing absolutely the reverse, and addressed itself to the ear, for the purpose of exciting that interest which it could not attain through the medium of the eye. ' "Dick was not a whit staggered by my argument, which he contended was founded on misrepresentation. 'Description, ' he said, 'was to the author of a romance exactly what drawing and tinting were to a painter; words were his colors, and, if properly employed, they could not fail to place the scene, which he wished to conjure up, as effectually before the mind's eye, as the tablet or canvas presents it to the bodily organ. The same rules, ' he contended, 'applied to both, and an exuberance of dialogue, in the former case, was a verbose and laborious mode of composition which went to confound the proper art of fictitious narrative with that of the drama, a widely different species of composition, of which dialogue was the very essence, because all, excepting the language to be made use of, was presented to the eye by the dresses, and persons, and actions of the performers upon the stage. But as nothing, ' said Dick, 'can be more dull than a long narrative written upon the plan of a drama, so where you have approached most near to that species of composition, by indulging in prolonged scenes of mere conversation, the course of your story has become chill and constrained, and you have lost the power of arresting the attention and exciting the imagination, in which upon other occasions you may be considered as having succeeded tolerably well. ' "I made my bow in requital of the compliment, which was probably thrown in by way of placebo, and expressed myself willing at least to make one trial of a more straightforward style of composition, in which my actors should do more, and say less, than in my former attempts of this kind. . . . " 1 Scott's use of this last concession in The Bride of Lammermoor, where he seems really to make a conscious attempt at repairing the proportions of his earlier work, may go farther than is commonly perceived toward accounting for the peculiar distinction of this most lyrical of his tales; though it still remains odd that Scott could be on the whole so indifferent a practitioner of that which he so shrewdly perceived and argued. Iv So far I speak of a general ideal of craftsmanship which is more French than English, and of some of its practical effects on English fiction. Now let us see what was the general effect of the Russians. We shall find it to have been sweeping ; for it resulted in the creation of a strikingly new form in fiction, a form which we may take the risk of caning the novel of the future. At all events it is the novel of the present, and decidedly not the novel of the past. It is a form which has evolved, not from the novel alone, but from the novel and the short story—both assimilated in a certain way under the mediation of some modern ideas, and under the intervention, as it seems to me, of direct influences from Russia. The novel of the past, as we know, formed itself by an ideal of dramatic structure, with a crisis at or after the middle—at all events far enough from the end so that there could be a definite change of direction in the plot. That is, the crisis served as a new initial impulse, from which the action proceeded under changed conditions to its end. Romola, which I have named already in a different connection, is an orthodox example of the dramatic structure carried out on a vast scale. Romola's life of struggle proceeds in a certain direction and toward certain ends until the events which involve the deaths of her husband and her god- father and her flight from the city; then it proceeds in an entirely different direction through the stages of her effort to re-plan her life and make a new place for herself. This is the general contour of the older conventional novel, as of the drama; and the short story differs from it chiefly in that it has no change of direction, but follows its theme straightforwardly to a crisis which is also the end. The older novel was two stories, or a story and its sequel; the short story is one story, cumulative in its effect. The new novel is a sublimated short story. It avails itself of the novel's fullness of treatment ; it may run to any length, even the inordinate length of the Victorian novels; but its theme is single, and it aims at rigid unity of effect—the unity which comes of one direction inexorably followed, and the use of all the material to illustrate a single principle. It replaces contrast and suspense with intensive thoroughness and the strict logic of causal succession. It is the short story under a microscope, the short story on a vastly enlarged scale. Henry James, an avowed disciple of Turgenev, was the first to practice this form in English; Mrs. Wharton, his disciple, has continued it; Conrad, whose literary kinships are of the Continent, has given it enlargement and several new characteristics; and our bookshelves are being filled with new works of extraordinary formal merit, and in length from 40, 000 to 200, 000 words, which prove on analysis to be, not novels of the older dramatic figuration, but short stories or novelle of the most rigid specialization in a single phase of life or character. The material of A novel may be present; but the purpose is to exhaust the meaning of a single issue, not to range freely over the whole complexity of life. Mr. Howells, whose mind has always turned with interest toward the arts as they are practiced in Europe, despite the strong and sane provincialism of his own creative work, recognized these tendencies more than a quarter of a century ago, and was pretty directly writing of them when he said: ". . . each man is a microcosm, and the writer who is able to acquaint us intimately with half a dozen people, or the conditions of a neighborhood or a class, has done something which cannot in any bad sense be called narrow; his breadth is vertical instead of lateral, that is all; and this depth is more desirable than horizontal expansion in a civilization like ours, where the differences are not of classes, but of types, and not of types either so much as of characters. A new method was necessary in dealing with the new conditions, and the new method is worldwide, because the whole world is more or less Americanized. Tolstoi is exceptionally voluminous among modern writers, even Russian writers; and it might be said that the forte of Tolstoi himself is not in his breadth sidewise, but in his breadth upward and downward. The Death of Ivan Illitch leaves as vast an impression on the reader's soul as any episode of War and Peace, which, indeed, can be recalled only in episodes, and not as a whole. I think that our writers may be safely counseled to continue their work in the modern way, because it is the best way yet known. If they make it true, it will be large, no matter what its superficies are; and it would be the greatest mistake to try to make it big. A big book is necessarily a group of episodes more or less loosely connected by a thread of narrative, and there seems no reason why this thread must always be supplied. Each episode may be quite distinct, or it may be one of a connected group ; the final effect will be from the truth of each episode, not from the size of the group. "' The effect of this kind of intensive specialization is a singular and most amazing rebirth in imaginative literature of something very like the classical unities of time, place, and action. The unities as they were observed in classic drama and in neo-classic imitations justified themselves in festhetics and were employed primarily for festhetic reasons; they served the work which obeyed them, not as agents of a closer contact with the real life of men and women, but as agents of an inward and self-sufficient harmony in the work itself. Marlowe and Shakespeare, when they cast aside the unities in order to get nearer to life, were freeing art from the shackles of convention. But the modern artist has got round to the beginning of the cycle; we see in him the unities recovered and reconstituted, though for different reasons and in a new spirit. He tells one story and one only because he wants to get to the bottom of something, not because of any fancied ideal of artistic symmetry; he takes a short and continuous stretch of time because he wants to preserve unbroken the chain of causality in his action, not because he thinks the flight of time in the work of art should match the flight of time in real events ; he keeps his scene narrowed and single because he wants to correlate man causally with his environment, not because he considers a change of scene inherently inartistic. The reasons are different; but the result, in concentration, in focus, is strikingly the same. This change in the shape of the novel, a change brought about by new ideas and a new purpose, constitutes the superiority of the modern novel as a form over any other large unit of imaginative expression whatever ; and it is one of the principal reasons for hoping that genius of the future will find more to facilitate, and less to impede, its utterance than it has ever found. V Have I seemed thus far to be slighting the purpose and meaning of fiction in favor of its subordinate means and methods? To do so has been far from my intention : I have wanted to speak of these lesser things just in so far as they are governed by the greater, and to treat the form of the novel only as it is ruled by the spirit. If I have not succeeded before this point in showing that our modern way of writing novels is a natural outcome of our modern way of looking at life, I shall have done so when I have noted once more that the service of de sign or technique is to help fiction represent life— not to copy it, or idealize it, or prove something about it, or make a substitute for it, but to represent it. Just as the details of an artist's subject are chosen to represent the whole subject, to stand for more than they are, so the whole subject is chosen to represent as much as may be of life. Other things equal, the worth of a piece of fiction is proportioned to its wideness or wealth of reference. The more it stands for, the more it is, even though it be slight in itself. And shall we not say that the purpose of modern technique, which has on the whole the effect of curtailing the subject-matter of the individual story, is tp extend and amplify the meaning of the story, and, through thoroughness of treatment, to make the artist's little stand for more than ever/ That economy of means and material should have led to enlargement of the representational power of the novel seems to me to be the most significant of recent general results in fiction. It is worthwhile, I think, to make room here for three examples of that result. Let the first be Mr. Hardy's Return of the Native, one of the most powerful novels of localized "atmosphere" in any language. The motif is set in an opening chapter, "A Face on which Time makes but Little Impression, " a Description of Egdon Heath, the barren waste in which the action takes place. This motif dominates the whole tale. As on the heath, so in the souls of the characters, and especially in the soul of the heroine, Eustacia Vye Yeobright, night and day wrestle together in a sort of interminable twilight. The inscrutable face of nature throughout the book is used to symbolize Mr. Hardy's view of the inscrutable way of the cosmos with the whole human species; man's daily life in a natural scene which is and must remain a riddle to him is subtly suggestive of our common life in an immensity which we can neither understand nor change; and the changelessness of that indifferent and mocking face of nature, which neither smiles nor frowns while men and women play for a moment their puny parts under its fixed gaze before they are swallowed into it, is an image of the eternal futility which Hardy saw as perhaps the one unifying reality of our common life. This is not symbolism, and it is not allegory : it is suggestion used to the end of representation on the grandest scale. It weaves a philosophy of the whole into the patterned history of a handful of lives. My other two examples, both pre-eminent novels of the first decade of this century, bring us to the threshold of the present. As unlike as possible from each other in substance and in minor points of technique, they are alike in that the masses of subject. matter of each are invoked by a single principle and dedicated to its illustration. In each instance, the principle is a large truth about life. Mr. Arnold Bennett 's Old Wives' Tale has on the surface as defiant a breach of unity as a novel could well contain; for there are two heroines of widely different and widely sundered lives, in large part separately observed and recorded. But there is a unity which comes out of this disjunction, and it is this : the life of Constance and the life of Sophia, separate and unlike as they are, arrive ultimately at an equal and a similar understanding of what life is. Life is something that we never understand until we have lived it ; and when we have lived it we see that it is something which we could never have lived at all if we had understood it first. That, says Mr. Bennett, is our common lot and the ultimate wisdom ; and it is a triumphant illustration of the modern kind of unity in purpose and effect that he should have brought so large a sense of community out of material inherently so scattered, so little subjected to the other and lesser modern practices of economy. Mr. Conrad's Nostromo is likewise a vindication of unity through principle and purpose, in defiance of technical regulations which are useful in their place. Here is a story of which, materially speaking, the very mainspring is romance—a story of a misgoverned tropical republic of the New World, with a silver- mine and a horde of pirates, with revolution and counter- revolution and any number of violent deeds and thrilling rescues, as its principal machinery. It is the representational use of all this that turns it into realism. For the country of the tale, Costaguana, is the modern world in symbolic miniature; and the triumph of the mine of silver over a group of individuals, some of whom loathe it and some covet, some of whom it drives to perjury, to treason, to murder, others of whom it despoils through its tragic effects on those whom they love—this triumph of the precious metal is the ascendancy of material interests in modern life, the tyranny of the economic, the corrosion of greed, the downfall of the idealist through his personal dependence on those whom material interests can corrupt or destroy. Nostromo is a pageant and an epic of a civilization founded on commerce ; and if half its greatness is in its mastery of the immediate facts, at least we may say that the other half is in the sweep and clarity of its synthetic representation of a good share of modern existence in a world whose most cherished precept is to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market. Category:Writing techniques